Building a Medical Endo-Microscope using open source software

Introduction and Product:Optiscan is an Australian company leading the world in Endo-Microscopy products for medical imaging. Our main product is a Laser based Endo-Microscope device which captures 3D microscopic images of internal tissues of patients. For our second generation product we chose open source software and tools as the basis for our development.

System outline:At the heart of the system we use Embedded Denx Linux on a MPC8349 processor (EPM). Peripheral devices that controls Lasers, Scanners and Detectors use a SAM7 port of FreeRTOS. System works by sending a Laser beam down an optical fibre to the tissue imaged. This excites photons at various depths of the tissue and these photons are focused back in to the fibre and detected at the other end. The fibre is moved in X, Y and Z direction to get a 3D image of the tissue. The resulting data is fed back through a peripheral board to the EPM via a digital link. A custom built Linux Device driver gathers this traffic from the processor local bus and streams via a user space app to a network host, to be displayed. Raw 1920x1080 images are achieved through the system at modest update rates which causes the data transfer rates of the system to exceeds 115Mb/s.

Janaka Subhawickrama

Janaka is an Embedded Software Engineer from Melbourne. He completed his bachelors in Digital Systems from Monash University then went on to complete his masters in Digital Communications. Technically he is passionate about software engineering, control systems and robotics, with tendencies for hands on hardware and electronics development. Outside work he has a keen interest in History, Geo-politics, Sports (rugby and any physically demanding sport), Jogging, Cycling, Gardening, Home improvements and technical projects. He is passionate about open source software and advocates its use where ever possible.He uses Firefox, Linux (Kubuntu/Debian), Kdiff, Gcc, Zoneminder, Kate, Kdevelop and other FOSS software.